Crispy pork belly with bak kut teh spicing

With what, you say? Bak kut teh. It's a Hokkien Chinese term which translates roughly as "meaty bone tea", and it denotes a particular herbal, scenty soup spicing which is traditionally meant to warm you from within. It's got yang, this stuff. So much so that my mother and brother won't eat it, because it makes them turn bright red and start sweating.

In a period when my village is only accessible over a hump-backed bridge coated with half a foot of sheet ice (it's been like this since before Christmas), red and sweating is exactly what I'm after. Hurrah for yang.

You'll find bak kut teh served regularly in Malaysia and southern China. Bak kut teh mixtures are available in the UK in oriental supermarkets, in sealed packs containing a couple of tea-bag style sachets. These sachets are preferable to the whole spices, which you also see sometimes in neat plastic packs - the whole spices can make your recipe a bit gritty. If you're making the traditional stew, just pop a bag in a crockpot with some rib bones, simmer for a few hours, and serve with rice or as a noodle soup with a generous slosh of soya sauce. It's hearty stuff - the traditional mixture includes star anise, angelica, cinnamon and cloves. This mixture is, somewhat eccentrically, close to what you'll find in a British Christmas cake.

The recipe below is not a traditional use of a bak kut teh sachet, but it's none the worse for that. Here, you'll be combining those spices with rice wine, several gloppy Chinese sauces, honey, spring onions and garlic, and using this stock to perfume a slab of pork belly. The belly meat is pressed under weights overnight in the fridge, then chopped and fried in a wok until it's crispy. I know, I know: but the long simmering will render a lot of the grease out of the meat, and sometimes the weather just calls out for fatsome, sticky pork.

I served mine with some sticky hoi sin sauce to dip, alongside a little of the stock, thickened with cornflour, to moisten the rice we ate with it. Hang onto the stock - you can freeze it and treat it as a master stock. I poached a couple of hams in mine, leaving them spiced and savoury but not overtly Chinese-tasting; it's back in the freezer now, and I have plans to poach a chicken in it next. This procedure may sound overly parsimonious to those used to stock cubes, but it's a method that produces a stock with an incredible depth of flavour, and you can keep using it indefinitely as a poaching liquid, adding a bit more water or wine and some more aromatics every time you cook, and making sure that every time it comes out of the freezer the stock gets boiled very thoroughly. There are restaurants in Hong Kong which claim that their master stock has been on the go for more than a hundred years.

To poach one boneless pork belly (enough for four, but be warned, this is very moreish) you'll need:

1 boneless pork belly, with rind
1 bak kut teh sachet
Water to cover the belly (about a litre)
150ml Chinese rice wine
5 tablespoons light soy sauce
3 tablespoons dark soy sauce
3 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons hoi sin sauce
3 tablespoons honey
2 anise stars
1 bulb garlic
6 spring onions, tied in a knot
Groundnut oil to fry

Stir the liquid ingredients together in a saucepan that fits the pork reasonably closely, and slide the pork in with the star anise, garlic and spring onions. Bring to a gentle simmer, skim off any froth that rises to the surface with a slotted spoon, cover and continue to simmer gently for two hours.

Remove the pork from the cooking liquid carefully and place it on a large flat dish with high enough sides to catch any liquid that comes out of the meat as you press it. Strain the poaching liquid if you plan on using it as a master stock. Place a plate or pan lid large enough to cover the whole belly on top of the meat (the skin side) and weigh it down. I used a heavy cast-iron pan lid and all the weights from my kitchen scales. Cover the whole assembly with a teatowel and leave it in the fridge for 24 hours.

When you are ready to eat, remove the pressed meat to a chopping board and use a sharp knife to cut it into bite-sized pieces, about 2cm square. Bring about 5cm depth of groundnut oil to a high temperature in a wok, and fry the pieces of pork in batches of five or six pieces until golden (this should only take a couple of minutes per batch). Serve with shredded spring onion and some hoi sin sauce with steamed rice and a vegetable.

Pork rillettes

Dr W pitched up with two kilos of pork belly a few weeks ago, having spotted it on offer at the butcher's. If you're familiar with this blog, you'll know that there are plenty of options here for cooking this particular cut - it's one of my favourites. Mind you, who wants to roast or casserole in this weather? Time to experiment with some charcuterie.

Rillettes (pronounced ree-etts) are a kind of coarse pate, made from gently cured meat poached in stock and its own fat (and, in this case, some fat from a duck) for hours until it becomes soft, falling into shreds. The fat is there to carry the flavour to the tastebuds, to provide some really world-beating texture, and as a preservative; once you've sealed your rillettes into sterilised jars, covered with a layer of the creamy fat, nothing will be able to get in there, so you'll be able to store them in the fridge for months. I'd recommend, in fact, that you don't eat your rillettes as soon as you've made them if you can possibly help it; a week or so in a jar will allow the flavours to develop fully.

Traditionalists will tell you to cure your meat with nothing but salt and pepper before cooking, and to avoid adding extra flavourings to the meat as you poach it. Traditionalists are, in my experience, a bloody miserable lot. My brother (currently right off pork, as he recovers slowly from swine flu) makes spectacular rillettes at Christmas, which he packs with lots of crushed juniper berries. I like mine garlicky and boozy, with plenty of aroma from a generous scattering of herbes de Provence, and some bay, lavender and thyme from the garden. To make your own (reduce the amounts if you want, but this keeps very well and makes an excellent gift - given that it's mildly fiddly, you'll be rewarded for making a large batch), you'll need:

2kg pork belly
1kg pork shoulder
2 bulbs garlic
2 heaped tablespoons herbes de Provence
2 tablespoons salt
6 fresh bay leaves
1 small handful (20g) thyme
1 small handful (20g) lavender leaves
750g rendered pork fat (I used duck fat from the confit I made earlier this year - you can also substitute goose fat here)
2 glasses white wine
Pork stock or water

Cut the pork (leaving the skin on the belly) into long strips about 1 inch square, and put it in a large mixing bowl. In a mortar and pestle, grind the salt, bay, thyme, lavender and herbes de Provence together. Rub the resulting mixture all over the strips of meat, cover and refrigerate for 48 hours. Curing the meat like this before cooking (you'll notice that the confit the duck fat came from was cured in a similar way) gives it what the French call a goût de confit - a very specific and delicious flavour you only really find in confited meats.

When the meat has cured, chop the strips, retaining the belly skin, into smaller pieces, about the size of your thumb. Put the meat and any salt and herbs from the bowl in a large casserole dish with the unpeeled garlic bulbs, chopped in half across their equators, and pour over the wine. Carefully pour over stock (I happened to have some pork stock in the freezer, but if you don't, don't worry about it - water will be fine) until it barely covers the meat, then spoon the rendered fat into the casserole dish. Heat the oven to 150°C and bring the casserole dish to a very gentle simmer on top of the stove. Pop it into the oven with the lid on and ignore it for five hours.

Remove the casserole from the oven and remove the meat and garlic from the liquid ingredients with a slotted spoon, putting them in a large mixing bowl. Leave the liquid in the casserole to stand and separate while you work on the meat.

When the meat is cool enough to handle, use your fingers to remove the skin from the belly pieces and discard it - it's done its work now and will have given up its gelatin to the cooking liquid, which you'll be using in a bit. Shred the meat (now lovely and soft, with all the fat rendered out) into another bowl, and squeeze the garlic from its skin into the bowl of shredded meat, discarding the skin. When all the meat is shredded evenly, use a ladle to skim all the fat from the liquid in the casserole, and put it in a jug. You'll be left with a glossy stock in the pan. Stir two or three ladles-worth of the stock into the shredded meat to moisten it, and pop the rest of the stock in the freezer for another day. Now ladle the liquid fat into the shredded meat bowl and mix everything in the bowl thoroughly and evenly, reserving a couple of ladles of fat to cover the rillettes in their jars. (Exactly how much you'll need depends on the size of jar you're using.) Taste the contents of the bowl for seasoning - this recipe benefits from some robust salting.

Pack the rillettes into sterilised jars, leaving half an inch of room at the top of each one for the fat you'll seal them with. (I also popped some in a terrine dish for serving to friends later in the week.) Pour fat into each jar/dish to cover, seal, and refrigerate until you come to eat them. I like to let the rillettes come to room temperature before spreading them on chunks of baguette, with some caper berries and cornichons on the side to cut through the velvety fat.

Cassoulet

No photos of this one, since cassoulet à la Liz, once dished up, turns out to look totally unlovely; and I really don't want to scare you off, because it tastes divine. I hope you made the duck confit (I have cunningly recycled the picture here from that recipe) from a few weeks back, which, along with its fat, forms an important part of this dish. If you didn't, though, you can usually find tins of excellent Castelnaudry confit in good delis in the UK (I've also seen it in Waitrose).

Cassoulet is one of those social-climbing dishes, which began life as a French peasant dish full of preserved meats and dried beans, and now gets sold for vast amounts of money in swish restaurants. You can buy tins of cassoulet, but a cassoulet you have made at home is even better, especially in mouth-feel. It's a wonderfully warming dish, and it's fantastic to serve to friends; somehow it's an especially cheering and convivial thing to eat. You can serve it up as is, or with crusty bread and a salad. I've used Japanese panko breadcrumbs here, which are not at all French. I'm developing a slight addiction to them - wonderfully crisp, with a slightly malty flavour and a perfect balance between absorbency and crustiness, they're terrific for topping baked dishes or making breaded coatings for baked or fried meats. If you can't find any, normal white breadcrumbs, whizzed in your food processor, will be absolutely fine. If you're in France, try to pick up some of the wonderful long, white haricot beans (haricots blancs lingots) which are traditionally used in cassoulet and have an amazingly creamy texture. They're hard to find in the UK, so I have fallen back on standard haricots, which are a shorter bean. They are still excellent in this dish.

Thanks not least to Iris Murdoch (whose A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which contains a very stressful cassoulet incident, managed singlehandedly to put me off making cassoulet myself for about fifteen years), cassoulet has a bit of a reputation as a complicated, work-intensive dish. It's really not all that bad; most of the work is done by your oven, with you stirring occasionally to help the slow-cooked beans become tender and creamy, and while there are short bursts of frying, skimming and stirring, you can easily fit all the other things you have to do in a day at around the long cooking time. Packed with moist pork belly, fat duck legs and garlicky sausage, this isn't for days when you're worrying about your blood pressure - as always, my philosophy on these things is that the rush of endorphins you get when eating something that tastes this good more than cancels out any health negatives, and hey - I understand beans are good for you.

To serve six, you'll need:

500g haricot beans
2 large onions
2 sticks celery
1 carrot
5 cloves
1 bouquet garni
1 large sprig rosemary
1 large sprig thyme
3 bay leaves
6 fat cloves garlic
1 tablespoon herbes de provence
¼ bottle white wine
4 tomatoes, chopped roughly
400g slab pork belly
3 confit duck leg and thigh joints
6 garlicky sausages (if you can find saussice de Toulouse, they're traditional here, but any very dense, meaty sausage will be good)
Japanese panko breadcrumbs OR bog-standard white breadcrumbs to sprinkle

The night before you want to eat, soak the beans in plenty of cold water. In the morning, drain the beans, discarding the soaking liquid, and put them in your largest casserole dish (you'll need plenty of spare room in there for the cooking liquid, the other ingredients and the eventual swelling of the beans) with the bouquet garni, the rosemary and thyme, one of the onions, halved and studded with the cloves, the carrot, halved lengthways, one stick of the celery, two of the bay leaves and two of the garlic cloves, peeled and left whole. Chop the pork belly, complete with its rind, into 1 inch chunks, and add it to the saucepan. Pour over cold water to cover the contents of the pan by a couple of inches, and bring to the boil, skimming off any scum that rises to the surface.

When the pot is boiling, lower the heat to a simmer and put the lid on. Ignore it for an hour and a half while you brown the sausages in a tablespoon of the fat from the confit in a frying pan. Remove them to a plate, and use the sausage pan to fry the remaining onion, garlic and celery stick, chopped finely, until soft, in another large tablespoon of duck fat. Preheat the oven to 180° C.

Remove and discard the herbs and vegetables (except the garlic and the bouquet garni) from the beans mixture and drain and reserve the liquid (now stock) from the casserole dish. Return the beans and pork to the casserole, adding the onion, garlic and celery mixture, the chopped tomatoes, the remaining bay leaves, the sausages and the confit duck legs. (Don't worry about scraping off any fat clinging to the legs - it'll just add to the wonderful texture.) Pour over the wine and add the reserved stock from the pork and beans to just cover the mixture. Add a tablespoon of salt. Bring the contents of the casserole to a simmer on the hob and put it in the oven for two hours with the lid on, stirring every half an hour.

When the two hours are up, there should be no visible liquid; the whole cassoulet should have an even, creamy texture. Taste for seasoning - you will probably need to add extra salt. Sprinkle the top of the cassoulet with the panko crumbs or breadcrumbs, and cook for another 20-30 minutes with the lid off, until the crumbs are brown and the cassoulet is bubbling through it in places. Serve up, making sure everyone gets a bit of duck, a bit of sausage, and a bit of pork with their creamy beans and crusty top.

Korean hotpot with pork, scallops and black beans

I hadn't come across chunjang, a Korean black bean sauce, until January's meal at the excellent Tanuki in Portland. In Korea, it's actually considered a Chinese sauce, but it's rather different from the saltier, stronger black bean sauces you'll find in the Chinese supermarket - very dark in colour, mild and sweet alongside the soy saltiness, and altogether delicious.

Once chunjang is cooked, it's called jajang (or fried sauce). It's usually served over noodles with stir-fried pork. I found some at Wai Yee Hong, my favourite online oriental supermarket. When it arrived, I realised I had some scallops and a big chunk of belly pork in the freezer, a sack of sticky rice, a nice block of tofu in the cupboard and a jar of kimchee in the fridge - and a recipe for a hotpot suddenly sprung into in my head, fully formed. Cooking the pork for this takes a long time, but it's actually very little work and is more than worth the extra effort for the incredible texture you finish up with.

To serve three, you'll need:

500g pork belly with rind
¼ bottle Chinese rice wine
Water
12 queen scallops
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
1 tablespoon Chinese rice wine
1 teaspoon grated ginger
450g firm tofu
5 dried shitake mushrooms
4 tablespoons kimchee
½ cucumber
8 spring onions (scallions)
2 green birds eye chillies
2 cups Chinese sticky rice (or Thai jasmine rice)
3 cups water
1 tablespoon cornflour
Flavourless oil

Begin the day (or two days) before you want to eat by heating two or three tablespoons of oil in a large frying pan or wok over a high flame. Brown the slab of pork belly until it crackles on the skin side and changes colour on the bottom.

Move the pork to a saucepan that fits it closely, and pour over the quarter-bottle of Chinese rice wine. Add water until liquid covers the pork by about an inch. Bring to a gentle simmer on the hob, then put in an oven at 120°C (240°F) for six hours or overnight. Remove from the cooking liquid (you can freeze this stock to use later, because you won't be using it in this recipe) and place the pork on a large plate. Put another plate on top and put the weights from your kitchen scale on the top plate to press the pork down, and chill for at least six hours. You can put the scallops in the fridge to defrost at this point too.

When the pork has been pressed and the scallops are defrosted, mix the scallops well in a bowl with the light soy sauce, a tablespoon of Chinese rice wine and the grated ginger, and set aside in the fridge. Pour boiling water over the dried shitake mushrooms to rehydrate them. Dice the tofu, chop the spring onions, and cut the cucumber into thin julienne strips.

Cut the pork into slices. Cook four tablespoons of chunjang in four tablespoons of oil (preferably groundnut, although a flavourless vegetable oil will be fine too) for five minutes over a medium flame. Much of the oil will be absorbed into the sauce. Add the chopped spring onions to the pan, reserving one of them for a garnish later, and stir-fry until they are soft. Add the pork to the pan with the chopped chillies and stir-fry until everything is mixed. Stir the cornflour into a quarter of a mug of cold water, and stir the cold mixture into the pork and black beans (now jajang, not chunjang, because you have cooked it) over the heat until the dish thickens. Remove from the heat and put to one side.

In a claypot or heavy saucepan, bring the rice and water to a brisk boil with the lid on, then turn the heat down very low. After 12 minutes, remove the lid and quickly spread out the black pork mixture over one half of the exposed surface of the rice. Spoon the raw, marinaded scallops and their marinade into the dish along with the sliced shitake mushrooms and the diced tofu, leaving a bit of space for the kimchee when the dish is finished. Sprinkle over five tablespoons of the soaking liquid from the mushrooms. Put the lid back on, and cook over the low heat for another 15 minutes until everything is piping hot.

The ingredients at the top of the dish will have steamed, and their savoury juices will have soaked deliciously into the rice. Add a few tablespoons of kimchee (I really like Hwa Nan Foods' version, which comes in a jar to keep in the fridge), arrange the cucumber on top of the dish as in the picture, and scatter the reserved spring onion over the pork. Dig in.

Twice-cooked aromatic pork hock

I mentioned earlier this week that I'd found a pork hock, big enough to serve three, for a recession-busting £2.30 at the butcher. Now, as with a lot of the more knobbly bits of a pig, my favourite thing to do with this cut is to stew it slowly, for a long time, with rich and aromatic Chinese flavourings like soy and star anise. That said, there are already a couple of recipes on this blog which show you how to stew a piece of meat like this (see the braised pork belly or the Malaysian braised pork with buns), so I decided to ring the changes by turning this into a twice-cooked dish. The soft, braised meat has its bones removed and is cooled before being deep-fried whole, then shredded. Served with the thick, reduced cooking liquid and a sprinkling of herbs and chillies, it's just gorgeous - crisp bits, soft bits, all with fantastic rich flavour that penetrates all the way through the meat.

The Japanese, who have a word for everything foodsome, call the mouth-feel you get with a dish like this umai - the sauce is umai because its thickness comes from the gelatin in the meat. (You know the kind of sauce I mean - it's the sort that turns into a set jelly if you leave it in the fridge.) If you enjoy the rich, silky texture of sauces like this, it's worth reducing and freezing any that you have left when you're done cooking and eating, and saving it to use as the base of the stock you use next time you cook a similar Chinese pork dish. You can do this indefinitely, and a master stock like this will just get better and better. Just follow your recipe as usual, but add the defrosted master stock to the dish at the same time you add any other liquid ingredients.

To serve two ravenous and unfortunately greedy people or three ordinarily-hungry people, you'll need:

1 pork hock
1 teaspoon five-spice powder
5 cloves garlic
4 shallots
3 stars of star anise
1 stick cinnamon
1 tablespoon sugar
6 spring onions
1 in piece ginger, sliced
3 tablespoons dark soy
5 tablespoons light soy
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
4 teaspoons runny honey
2 teaspoons salt
250 ml pork stock
1 glass Chinese cooking wine
Water to cover
1 handful fresh coriander
1 red chilli
750ml peanut oil (use a flavourless oil if you can't find any)

Blend the shallots, garlic, five-spice powder, 2 stars of anise, the sugar and the spring onions together in a food processor, and fry the resulting mix in a small amount of oil in the bottom of a heavy saucepan until it is turning a light caramel colour. Add the pork hock to the pan and brown on all sides, then pour over the stock, Chinese wine, honey, sauces and salt. Add three of the spring onions, the ginger and remaining star of anise to the pan with the cinnamon stick, broken into a few pieces. Add water if necessary to cover the meat.

Put the lid on the pan and bring to a very gentle simmer. Continue to simmer, turning occasionally, for 4-5 hours. At the end of this time, the hock should be soft and aromatic, and the bones falling out of the middle. Remove the meat to a plate and, when it is cool enough, remove both bones from the hock (they'll slip out very easily - you won't need a knife). Don't remove the skin - it's the best bit.

Remove the spring onions and ginger from the stock and discard, and boil the stock to reduce it to about half its volume. Dice the chilli, chop the coriander and remaining fresh spring onions finely, and put them in a small bowl.

Heat 750 ml of oil in a wok to between 175 and 190°C (345–375°F). Fry the cooled hock for four minutes, then turn it over and fry for a further four minutes. Drain and remove to a plate, and use two forks to shred the meat. Serve over rice, with some of the thickened stock poured over, and the spring onion, chilli and coriander mixture sprinkled liberally on top.

Cochinita pibil

This red-cooked Mexican pork is marinated in an acidic dressing, then cooked slowly for hours, with meltingly tender results. It's a traditional recipe from Yucatan, where pork would be marinaded in the bitter local orange juice with achiote paste, then wrapped in banana leaves and buried in a fire pit for hours (pibil is Mayan for buried). Those of you without a handy banana tree and fire pit can make it in the oven in a dish sealed tightly with tinfoil - banana leaves, although very decorative, don't really add any flavour, so you're not really losing out here. The juice of bitter oranges can be approximated with a bit of vinegar and some lemon juice blended with sweet orange juice.

Unfortunately, while you can do clever conjuring tricks with your lemons, vinegar and tinfoil, there's not really anything you can substitute for the achiote paste in this recipe. Achiote is what gives this dish its lovely red colour. It's a made from crushed annatto seeds - in the UK you can sometimes find achiote powder (Barts make it and it's stocked in the spices section in some supermarkets), but the paste is far preferable. The Cool Chile Company, Mexgrocer and Casa Mexico are good UK suppliers of Mexican ingredients, and will mail you some paste.

To serve four, you'll need:

825g fat pork shoulder
3 tablespoons achiote paste
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1½ teaspoons each fennel, coriander and cumin seeds, ground in the pestle and mortar
½ teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
1 crumbled bay leaf
1 teaspoon oregano
10 cloves garlic, crushed or grated
Juice of 2 oranges
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
2 pointy peppers
1 large onion
1 tablespoon salt

Start by chopping the pork into chunks about 3 inches square. Don't trim the fat away - it will moisten the meat as it cooks. Put the pork in a large bowl with the herbs, spices, juices, vinegar, salt and garlic, stir well to blend all the ingredients and marinate overnight.

When you come to cook the pork, chop the onion into large chunks and brown the chunks in a dry frying pan. Chop the peppers into long strips. Spread the pork and its marinade evenly in a shallow dish, layer the onion and peppers on top, and cover tightly with a couple of pieces of tinfoil, making sure you make a good seal all around the edge of the dish. Roast on a low rack in the oven at 150°C (300°F) for three hours.

When the cooking time is up, unwrap the dish and leave to rest for ten minutes. Serve on tortillas (corn tortillas are great if you can find them - again, they're sometimes hard to find in the UK) with guacamole, a good dollop of sour cream or crème fraîche (crème fraîche is closer to the crema you'd eat in Mexico), some fresh coriander and Mexican pickled onions. Those onions are the gorgeous pink things in the picture at the top, and they're a traditional accompaniment for this dish - I'll put up a recipe for them later in the week.

Ma-po tofu

I write this with two of my friends in mind - Francis, whose tofu disintegrates, and Simon, who, on hearing that I was making something with beancurd in, said: "Ewww! Tofu!" - the sod.

Now, unlike Simon, I'm lucky enough to have spent a childhood being exposed not to the vegetarian tofu-masquerading-as-meat school of cooking, but the Chinese sort, where tofu is a delicious addendum to meat. In this dish (whose name means 'pock-marked old woman's tofu', just to put Simon off even further) the tofu isn't treated as a blank sponge of protein to absorb flavour - instead, its own flavour, actually rather subtle, delicate and somehow cooling, is a contrast to an amazingly savoury, chilli-hot surrounding of soy, chillies and pork. Totally delicious, and it's very easy to make - just make sure that all your ingredients are chopped and ready in bowls before you start to stir-fry, because you'll have to move fast once you begin cooking.

To serve six, you'll need:

500g pork mince
3 tablespoons dark soya sauce
3 teaspoons cornflour
1 teaspoon sugar
50ml Chinese wine
700g firm silken-style tofu (Blue Dragon is good, and it's easy to find in UK supermarkets)
5 cloves garlic
1 piece ginger, about the length of your thumb
6 dried shitake mushrooms without stems
400ml water
3 red bird's eye chillies (I like this hot - cut down on the chillies if you don't)
2 tablespoons chilli bean paste
12 spring onions (scallions)
1 tablespoon sesame oil

In a large bowl, mix the pork (I like quite a fatty mince here) with one teaspoon of the cornflour, the dark soy, sugar and Chinese wine. Set aside for a couple of hours in the fridge.

While the pork is marinading, soak the mushrooms in the boiling water. Chop the tofu into cubes about 2cm on each side and set aside in a bowl. Chop the garlic and ginger into tiny dice, slice the chillies finely, and put them all in another bowl. Chop the spring onions into small pieces and put the pieces from the lower, creamy and pale green half of the stem in the bowl with the garlic, ginger and chillies, and the pieces from the top, dark green half of the stem in a third bowl. When the mushrooms have soaked for half an hour, chop them into dice about the same size as the spring onion pieces, reserving the soaking liquid, and put the chopped mushrooms in the bowl with the garlic, ginger, chillies and the bottom half of the spring onions.

When you're ready to start cooking, heat a wok with a couple of tablespoons of flavourless oil in the bottom until it starts to smoke. Throw the pork and its marinade in, and stir-fry until the pork has browned and starts to look a little crusty. Add the contents of the ginger and garlic bowl, stir-fry for about twenty seconds, and add the chilli bean sauce. Keep stir-frying until everything is mixed well, and add the tofu with the soaking liquid from the mushrooms. Stir very gently to make sure everything is combined.

Turn the heat down low and bring everything to a simmer - the tofu should be distributed evenly through the mixture. Don't stir (this instruction is especially for you, Francis), or the tofu will break up - as it is, you'll notice it breaks up a little, but the vast majority should stay in firm cubes. Allow the mixture to simmer for ten minutes, then add the remaining cornflour mixed with a little cold water (the water must be cold, or you'll get lumps), stir very gently and simmer until thickened. Throw in the green tops of the spring onions, sprinkle over the sesame oil, and transfer to a bowl to serve.

Honey-mustard pork steaks with onion and apple pilaf

I'm going to the US for ten days tomorrow for a friend's wedding in MA and my first trip to New York. (Yes, I am almost pathologically excited about the restaurants.) Posts may be a bit thin on the ground while I'm away, but I'll try to update occasionally.

Today's recipe is a nice easy marinade for some pork shoulder steaks (a lean cut that benefits from some robust marinading), and an onion and apple pilaf to accompany them. What is it about apples and pork that works so well together? I've used Braeburn apples here - although they're an eating apple rather than a cooking one, they hold their shape well when cooked, especially if you leave the skin on, and that skin is a pretty pink, so they look good too. Being an eating apple, they're also nice and sweet, which is fantastic with the salty pork. This is an economical dish to cook for a lunch party. You can often find pork steaks on sale at a low price, and although rice is more expensive these days, it's still not crippling. Serve alongside a nice lemony salad to cut through the sweetness.

To serve six, you'll need:

Pork
6 pork steaks
3 heaped tablespoons grainy Dijon mustard
3 heaped tablespoons runny honey
4 tablespoons light soy sauce
Juice of 1 lemon
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Pilaf
800 g Basmati rice
2.25 litres chicken stock
2 large onions
3 Braeburn apples
5 cloves garlic
1 cinnamon stick
1 teaspoon crushed dry chilli
8 fresh sage leaves, finely chopped
1 small handful parsley
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon soft brown sugar
3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper

Pork method
Marinade the pork in the mustard, honey, lemon, soy and olive oil overnight. Cook under a hot grill, about 7 minutes per side, basting frequently with the marinade.

Pilaf method
Slice the onions thinly. Core two of the apples and chop them into dice. Chop the garlic. Sauté the onions, garlic and apple pieces with the chillies and cinnamon stick in the olive oil and butter until soft. Stir in the balsamic vinegar and sugar with a teaspoon of salt, and allow the vinegar to bubble and reduce for thirty seconds. Tip the dry rice and the sage into the pan and stir well to make everything is mixed. Pour over the hot stock and bring to a fast boil, then immediately turn the heat down low, put the lid on and simmer gently for 12 minutes. Season to taste and dress with the remaining apple (diced or sliced - it's up to you) and some fresh parsley.

Soy and anise braised pork

I know a lot of you come here for the Chinese and Malaysian recipes, and it hit me last week that I've not produced anything new in that line for a couple of months. This soy and anise pork has been worth the wait, though - here, belly pork is braised in a deeply fragrant and savoury sauce until it's so tender that it positively melts in the mouth.

Star anise is a beautiful, flower-shaped spice from a Chinese evergreen; it's an entirely different species of plant from European anise, although it has a similar flavour. It's one of the aromatics used in five-spice powder, and has a warm, intensely fragrant taste. There's been something of a shortage of the spice in recent years because an acid found in star anise is used in making Tamiflu, the anti-influenza drug. Happily for the cooks among you (and those with flu), drugs companies have since started to synthesise shikimic acid, so star anise is back on the shelves again. The Chinese use it as an indigestion remedy - you can try it yourself by releasing a seed from the woody star and chewing it after a meal if you feel you've overindulged.

This recipe capitalises on the affinity star anise has for rich meats like pork. Belly pork is one of my favourite cuts of meat (you can find some more recipes for belly pork here) - it's flavourful, has brilliant texture, and the fat gives it a wonderful unctuous quality as it bastes itself from within. To serve four with rice and a stir-fried vegetable, you'll need:

1 kg pork belly
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon five-spice powder
2 tablespoons lard or flavourless oil
5 cloves garlic
6 shallots
4 flowers of star anise
2 tablespoons soft brown sugar
4 tablespoons dark soy sauce
2 teaspoons salt
250 ml pork or chicken stock

Using a very sharp knife or a Chinese cleaver, chop the pork into strips about 1.5 cm thick. (Do not remove the skin, which will become deliciously melting when cooked.) Mix one tablespoon of the soy sauce with the honey and five-spice powder in a bowl, and marinade the sliced pork in the mixture for an hour.

Chop the garlic and shallots very finely. Heat the lard to a high temperature in a thick-bottomed pan with a close-fitting lid, and fry the garlic, shallots, star anise and brown sugar together until they begin to turn gold. Turn the heat down to medium, add the pork to the pan with its marinade, and fry until the meat is coloured on all sides.

Pour over the chicken stock, and add the salt and the rest of the soy sauce. Bring the mixture to the boil, reduce to a gentle simmer, cover and continue to simmer for two hours, turning the meat every now and then. If the sauce seems to be reducing and thickening, add a little water.

This is one of those recipes which is even better left to cool, refrigerated, and then reheated the next day.

Normandy roast belly pork

Pork belly is a fabulous cut. It's striated with layers of fat between the layers of sweet meat, which, when cooked slowly, melt and baste the joint from within. The English finally seem to be catching on to the idea that belly pork is a good, good thing. I challenge you to find a gastropub menu that doesn't feature belly pork. It pops up much more often in all kinds of restaurants than it used to (I remember a time not so long ago when the only restaurants serving it were in Chinatown), and it's appearing much more frequently in supermarkets, so you no longer have to ask for it specially at the butcher's. It's also a pleasingly inexpensive cut of meat; you're paying mere pennies for one of the tastiest bits of the pig, which represents real value.

Pork and apples are natural friends, so I've served this slow-roasted joint and its crackling with a cidery, creamy shallot and bacon sauce, and slices of sweet fried apple. Gather your windfalls now - this is a perfect autumn dish.

To serve four, you'll need:

1kg piece of belly pork
2 large onions
5 rashers smoked streaky bacon
1 sweet eating apple
4 shallots
1 wineglass cider
5 tablespoons crème fraîche
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 150° C (300° F). Use kitchen paper to dry the pork rind well. Score rind of the belly pork in lines about half a centimetre apart with a sharp craft knife, and rub it with salt and pepper. Cut the onions in half and place them, flat side down, in a metal roasting tin, then rest the pork on them - the onions should form a platform for the pork so it doesn't touch the hot tin and sit in its own fat.

Put the pork in the oven for 3 hours and forget about it. When the time is up, turn the heat up to 200° C (400° F) for a final 20 minutes. Remove the pork from the oven and put it under a hot grill until the skin crackles evenly (about five minutes). Keep an eye on the pork under the grill - it is easy to singe the skin. Finally, leave the pork in a warm place to rest while you prepare the sauce.

Chop the bacon into little lardons and fry without any oil in a non-stick frying pan. When the bacon is crisping up, remove it to a bowl, keeping any bacon fat in the pan. Slice and core the apple, leaving the skin on. Fry the apple slices in the bacon fat until golden and set aside. (If the bacon hasn't released enough fat, use a spoonful of pork fat from the roasting tin.) Finally, slice the shallots finely and brown them in the bacon fat over a medium flame. Keeping the pan on the heat, add the bacon to the pan, pour over the cider and bring it to the boil for two minutes to burn off the alcohol. Add the crème fraîche to the pan and stir well, and finally add the cooked apples.

Serve the pork on a bed of the sauce and apples with some mashed potato and a green vegetable.

Carnitas

Carnitas are one of my favourite Mexican dishes. This is a luscious way with pork, which brings out a deep flavour from the meat and gives it a superbly silky texture. Unfortunately, I can predict as I type this that some of you are going to balk once you've read the recipe - because all this deliciousness comes about because the meat is poached in nearly its own weight in pork fat, then drained. I know that the word 'lard' is about as popular as the word 'anthrax' in recipes these days. It's a great, great shame - there is joy in good foods, and some of the very best are thick and unctuous with glossy animal fats.

We appear to have developed a terrible national neurosis about fat in general, and animal fats in particular. In moderation (after all, you're probably not going to be eating carnitas more than a couple of times a year at the most), fat is just part of a balanced diet. It provides a vehicle for vitamins A, D, E and K, which are only made available to your body when dissolved in fat. Fat maximises flavour, creates exceptional textures (think of a lardy puff-pastry, a potato cooked in goose fat, a crisp slice of bacon), and, quite simply, fat can make you happy, which is as positive an outcome as I can imagine. Fat is, undoubtedly, fattening...but I encourage you to take a trip to the supermarket and look at the average size of the glum people stuffing their trolleys with low-fat spreads and low-fat ready meals. Worst of all, there have been reports recently that parents have been so worried by the dire messages we're all getting about fat that they are feeding their children a diet unnaturally low in fats, resulting in deficiencies in those fat-soluble vitamins and, surprisingly, obesity later in life. If you're worried about your cholesterol level, the best advice I can offer is to follow your carnitas up with a bowl of porridge for pudding.

So here is an unapologetically fatty recipe. Please cook it and enjoy it rather than worrying about it. To serve six, you'll need:

1 kg lean pork, cut into 2-inch cubes
750g lard (this is best purchased from your butcher if he cooks on the premises - otherwise, a block from the supermarket will be fine)
1 onion
1 handful coriander
2 green chillies
Sour cream or crème fraîche, salsa and tortillas to serve.

Make sure the pork is well trimmed of fat. I bought a whole, boned leg joint and diced it myself, removing the skin - this can sometimes be cheaper than buying ready-diced pork. Put the pork in a large bowl and season it generously (use a little more salt than you think you will need) with salt and pepper.

Melt the lard over a medium flame in a large, heavy-bottomed pan. Tip the pork into the lard and simmer for between 1 hour 15 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes. When the pork is ready it will just be beginning to brown, and it will be soft to the fork. Use a slotted spoon to remove the pork from the lard, and put it in a baking dish. Preheat the oven to 200° C (400° F).

Use two forks to shred the meat well. Chop the onion into small dice, and slice the chillies. Chop the coriander finely. Mix the onion, chillies and coriander with the meat in the dish, then cover the whole lot tightly with tin foil.

Bake the dish for 15 minutes. The carnitas will be warmed through - the onion, not completely cooked, will be sweet, but will still retain its crunch. I poured some heated mole verde from Sol at Mexgrocer over the dish, but this isn't necessary - I just felt like some delicious Mexican overkill.

Serve your carnitas with some salsas, soured cream and tortillas, (and watch this space for a pathetically easy guacamole). Summer might have finished, but if you eat like this you can almost convince yourself that your dining table is temporarily in Mexico.

Crispy Chinese roast pork

I am pathetically proud of having successfully cooked a strip of Chinese roast belly pork (siew yoke or siew yuk, depending on how you transliterate it) at home. This pork, with its bubbly, crisp skin and moist flesh is a speciality of many Cantonese restaurants. An even, glassy crispness is hard to achieve if you're making it at home, but I think I've cracked it; with this method, you should be able to prepare it at home too.

You'll need a strip of belly pork weighing about two pounds. Here in the UK you may have trouble finding a belly in one piece (for some reason, belly pork is often sold in thick but narrow straps of meat); look for a rolled belly which you can unroll and lay flat, make friends with a pliant butcher or shop at a Chinese butcher (you'll find one in most Chinatowns). Look for a piece of meat with a good layer of fat immediately beneath the skin. The belly will have alternating layers of meat and fat. Try to find one with as many alternating strips as possible.

To serve three or four (depending on greed) with rice, you'll need:

2lb piece fat belly pork
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon five-spice powder
½ teaspoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon Mei Gui Lu jiu (a rose-scented Chinese liqueur - it's readily available at Chinese grocers, but if you can't find any, just leave it out)
3 cloves garlic, crushed
2oo ml water
2 tablespoons Chinese white vinegar

Bring the water and vinegar to the boil in a wok, and holding the meat side of your pork with your fingers, dip the rind in the boiling mixture carefully so it blanches. Remove the meat to a shallow tray and dry it well. Rub the sugar, salt, five-spice powder, cinnamon, Mei Gui Lu jiu and garlic well into the bottom and sides of the meat, leaving the rind completely dry. Place the joint rind side up in your dish.

Use a very sharp craft knife to score the surface of the rind. If your rind came pre-scored, you still need to work on it a bit - for an ideal crackling, you should be scoring lines about half a centimetre apart as in this photo, then scoring another set of lines at ninety degrees to the original ones, creating tiny diamonds in the rind. Rub a teaspoon of salt into the rind. Place the dish of pork, uncovered (this is extremely important - leaving the meat uncovered will help the rind dry out even further while the flavours penetrate the meat) for 24 hours in the fridge.

Heat the oven to 200° C (450° F). Rub the pork rind with about half a teaspoon of oil and place the joint on a rack over some tin foil. Roast for twenty minutes. Turn the grill section of your oven on high and put the pork about 20cm below the element. Grill the meat with the door cracked open for twenty minutes, checking frequently to make sure that the skin doesn't burn (once the crackling has gone bubbly you need to watch very closely for burning). The whole skin should rise and brown to a crisp. This can take up to half an hour, so don't worry if the whole thing hasn't crackled after twenty minutes - just leave it under the grill and keep an eye on it.

Remove the meat from the heat and leave it on its rack to rest for fifteen minutes. Cut the pork into pieces as in the picture at the top of the page. Serve with steamed rice, with some soya sauce and chillies for dipping. A small bowl of caster sugar is also traditional, and these salty, crisp pork morsels are curiously delicious when dipped gingerly into it.

Swedish meatballs

Apologies for the 24-hour disappearance of this blog yesterday and today. I've been experiencing increasingly bad problems with Blogger, and am looking at moving to another publisher. Unfortunately, as Gastronomy Domine is published via ftp and doesn't live on the blogspot.com server, any changeover is made rather fiddlier than I'm happy dealing with - do any readers have any experience or suggestions?

Anyway - on with the food.

Here's a final recipe for your smorgasbord, to go with the Janssons frestelse, the cucumber salad and some gravadlax with dill-mustard sauce. (I may have a post in a couple of weeks on curing your own salmon - currently, though, the fridge is full to bursting, so I ended up buying some pre-cured gravadlax from the supermarket...and very nice it was too.) These meatballs, thanks to a generous (and typically Swedish) amount of cream and milk soaking the breadcrumbs, are deliciously soft and moist. I prefer not to deep fry them (saving on the washing up), but the soft texture does mean that when pan-fried, you are likely to end up with a meatpolyhedron rather than a meatball. Never mind. They still taste lovely.

Because I was serving these with the Janssons frestelse, which has a creamy sauce of its own, I didn't make a sauce to accompany these meatballs. If you'd like a sauce, just stir a small pot of soured cream and a little salt and pepper into the crusty, meaty, buttery bits left in the frying pan until bubbling, and pour over the meatballs. This is not a particularly beautiful sauce, but it's exceptionally tasty.

A note on ingredients. I've used a mixture of meats here -half pork, and half veal. These days it's becoming easier to find veal that's been raised ethically (i.e. not in a crate), but if you are still uncomfortable with it, feel free to substitute the veal with beef.

To make about thirty meatballs for a smorgasboard (if you want less, the cooked meatballs freeze very successfully, or you can just reduce the quantites), you'll need:

1 cup stale white breadcrumbs
1 cup single (light) cream
1 cup milk
2 beaten eggs
400g minced veal
400g minced pork
1 medium onion, grated
1 heaped teaspoon ground allspice
1 tablespoon salt
Generous amount of freshly ground black pepper
Butter to fry

Mix the breadcrumbs, cream and milk in a small bowl and leave for twenty minutes for the crumbs to absorb the liquid. Use your hands to mix the crumbs, meat, eggs, seasonings and onion together, and divide the mixture into meatballs, shaping by rolling between your palms.

Melt some butter until sizzling in a large frying pan and add the meatballs in batches, being sure not to crowd the pan. Cook for ten minutes, turning regularly, until the meatballs are golden brown and becoming crusty.

Fragrant garlic-grilled pork medallions

This is a great dish for those trying to avoid too much fat in their diet. Pork fillet is a very lean (and pleasingly inexpensive) cut of meat, but marinated and grilled like this it stays moist. It's delicious, especially if you allow the edges to caramelise under the hot grill, and is a brilliant dish for garlic lovers.

One fillet will serve two people. For every fillet you cook, you'll need:

1 pork fillet
4 tablespoons light soya sauce
2 tablespoons dark soya sauce
4 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons hoi sin sauce
2 tablespoons soft brown sugar
1 red chilli
1 head garlic
Coriander or spring onion to garnish

Slice the long fillet into discs about a centimetre thick. Place in a bowl with the sauces, honey, sliced chilli and finely chopped garlic, stir well to coat and leave in the fridge overnight.

Place the medallions of pork under a hot grill or on a barbecue, and cook for four minutes per side, basting with the marinade. Bring any remaining marinade to the boil in a small pan, and use as a thick sauce. Serve over rice, with some crisp steamed vegetables.

Spiced Chinese pork casserole

You'll need a slow cooker (sometimes called a crock pot) for this one. If you live in a university town, keep an eye on Facebook and Craigslist at the end of term; here in Cambridge, a lot of slow cookers, rice cookers and other equipment advertisements pop up at decent prices when overseas students return home. Mine came from a Singaporean student, and hadn't even been used - the safety stickers were still glued to the bowl. Not bad for £10.

Slow cooking's unbelievably easy - you just toss the ingredients in, turn the machine on and leave it for six to eight hours (an opportunity which I took to go shopping). The machine keeps the temperature low, at between 80° C and 90° C, and the food cooks for a correspondingly long time. You'll find that meats cooked like this absorb a phenomenal amount of flavour from the ingredients they are cooked with, and these Chinese seasonings are excellent here, infusing the pork pieces with a dark, spiced softness.

To serve three to four people, you'll need:

500g diced pork leg
2 star anise flowers
3 cloves
1 cinnamon stick
4 spring onions, tied in a knot
1 red chilli
4 cloves of garlic, sliced
1 piece of ginger the size of your thumb, sliced
50 ml Chinese rice wine
50 ml light soya sauce
50 ml teriyaki sauce
1 heaped tablespoon brown sugar
3 teaspoons sesame oil
Water

This is hopelessly easy - just mix all the ingredients except the water well and place in the bowl of the slow cooker. Try to find relatively fatty pork - this will give the meat a moister finish. Add water to cover the meat, put on the lid and cook for one hour on high, then five hours on low. (Don't allow the dish to cook for more than eight hours, at which point the meat will start to lose flavour.)

When you are ready to serve, remove the spring onions from the sauce (they will be unattractive and slimy, but they will have given up all their flavour to the rest of the dish) and dish up the casserole over rice. Garnish with fresh, diced spring onion and pour a teaspoon of sesame oil over each portion.

Sage, onion and apple stuffing balls

This was one of my Grandma's recipes. She was not an awfully good cook (you can still make my mother pale by saying 'trifle' or 'Grandma's mushroom thing' to her); she refused to turn the oven up to any sort of temperature which might make its insides dirty; she taught me to make an omelette out of nothing but eggs, butter, parsley and about half a bottle of Worcestershire sauce; and she used the kind of cottage cheese that comes with bits of pineapple in to make her lasagne. I miss her.

This recipe was one of her good ones, and we often make these very simple stuffing balls to accompany roast meats. To make about sixteen little balls, you'll need:

1 packet sage and onion stuffing mix
1 large onion
5 leaves fresh sage
1 eating apple
500g good sausagemeat
3 tablespoons butter
Salt and pepper

Make up the stuffing mix according to the packet instructions, adding one tablespoon of butter with the boiling water. I much prefer good old Paxo to the wholemeal, organic, lumpy brown premium brands, but feel free to go with your favourite. Chop the onion and cored apple into dice about the size of a woman's little fingernail. Chop the sage finely.

Put the sausagemeat (if good sausagemeat isn't available near you, buy some good sausages and pop the meat out of the skins), stuffing mix, chopped sage, apple and onion in a mixing bowl, and use your hands to squash and mix all the ingredients together with some salt and pepper. Divide the mixture into small balls and arrange in a non-stick baking tray. Dot the stuffing balls with the remaining butter. Cook for 40 minutes at 180° C (350° F) and serve alongside your Sunday roast.

Hearty Chinese meatball soup

This is one of those recipes which feels really, really good for you. A clear chicken stock, flavoured with ginger, rice wine, spring onions and garlic, forms the base for this lovely soup. Meatballs still crisp from frying float in it, deliciously light in texture with their little cubes of water chestnut. Fresh, barely cooked slivers of baby vegetables give the whole dish a lovely sweetness.

If you made the chicken rice on this site, you may have kept some of the leftover broth in the freezer. If your freezer is innocent of chicken broth, you can make some from scratch using:

3 pints water
1 lb chicken wings (usually very cheap from the butcher)
1 inch piece of ginger, whacked with the flat of a knife to squash it a bit
5 cloves of garlic, crushed slightly with the flat of a knife
5 spring onions, tied together in a knot
2 tablespoons light soya sauce
1 wine glass of Chinese rice wine
1 chicken stock cube

Just bring all the ingredients to the boil in a large pan, reduce to a simmer and cook, skimming any froth of the top occasionally, for 30 minutes. Strain the solid ingredients out and discard. The broth can now be used or frozen. (These amounts will make enough for you to use half now for this soup, and freeze half to use later.)

To make the meatballs and finish the soup you'll need:

1 lb pork mince
1 egg
5 spring onions
5 cloves of garlic
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger
2 tablespoons dark soya sauce
1 tablespoon light soya sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 red chilli
Seasoned flour
1 small can water chestnuts
1 small handful each of baby carrots, mange tout peas and baby sweetcorn

Cut the spring onions, garlic, ginger, chilli and water chestnuts into small dice and combine with the pork, soya sauces, sesame oil and egg in a large bowl. Use your hands to form the mixture into meatballs about an inch across, and roll them in the seasoned flour.

Slice the vegetables into matchsticks. Saute the meatballs in a small amount of vegetable oil while you bring 1½ pints of the broth to a gentle simmer. When the meatballs are cooked and the broth is bubbling gently, drop the vegetables into the broth and immediately turn the heat off. Fill bowls with the vegetable-filled broth and place meatballs in each bowl. Garnish with sliced spring onion and eat immediately.

These meatballs are also fantastic just served with rice and a little soya sauce with raw chillies diced into it to dip.

Char siu pastry

Here's another dim sum recipe; in Cantonese this savoury pastry, a bit like a little pie, is called Char Siu Sau. It's a parcel of crisp, flaky puff-pastry wrapped around succulent barbecued pork in a sweetly spicy sauce.

Char siu, the barbecued pork in question, has featured on this blog before, and is very easy to make - see the recipe here. The pastry I use to make these is a Malaysian-Chinese flaky pastry, made incredibly short and delicate with a lot of fat and some lemon juice. This is an altogether fatty recipe which is best made for a party (and believe me, if you serve them at a party they'll vanish in no time at all).

To make about thirty little pastries (they freeze very well before the final baking stage, so you can assemble them and then freeze a few for a treat later on) you'll need:

Filling
2 fillets of char siu
2 tablespoons lard
8 fat cloves garlic, chopped finely
2 medium onions, cut into small dice
4 tablespoons soft light brown sugar
2 teaspoons sesame oil
2 tablespoons kecap manis (sweet dark soya sauce - use 2 tablespoons of dark soya sauce and a teaspoon of soft light brown sugar if you can't find any)
2 tablespoons light soya sauce
4 fl oz water
2 tablespoons plain flour
1 tablespoon vegetable oil

Pastry
1 lb flour
4 oz butter
8 oz lard
1 egg, and another to glaze
2 tablespoons sugar
Juice of ½ a lemon
6 fl oz water

Begin by cooking the filling. Chop the two fillets of pork into small dice. Dice the onions finely and chop the garlic. Mix the vegetable oil and flour in a cup. Saute the garlic in the lard until it begins to give up its scent (about 2 minutes) and then add the onions, moving them around the pan until they turn translucent (another 2 minutes or so). Add the sugar, sauces, water and sesame oil to the pan, and bring up to a gentle simmer. Add the diced pork and stir until everything is well coated with the sauce. Add the oil and flour mixture, and stir until everything is thickened (about a minute).

Remove everything to a large bowl and chill in the fridge. (Your little pastry packets will be easier to fill with a thick, cold mixture.)

For really successful pastry, there are a few rules: keep the ingredients as cold as possible, rest the pastry for at least half an hour, and handle it as little as you can manage. To make the pastry, mix a beaten egg with the water, sugar and lemon juice, and chill until nicely cold. Rub the butter, straight from the fridge, into the flour until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs, then use a knife to chop the chilled lard into small dice, about the size of the top joint of a woman's little finger. Stir the lard into the butter and flour mixture. Add the liquid ingredients to the bowl and use a knife or spatula (cooler than your hands) to bring everything together into a dough. Wrap with cling flim and rest in the fridge for at least half an hour.

When you are ready to assemble the pastries, roll half the ball of dough out into a rectangle about half a centimetre thick, fold it into three (as if you were folding a piece of A4 paper to put in an envelope), turn it through 90 degrees so the long edge is facing you, and roll it out again. Fold, roll and turn another four times. You'll end up with a slab of pastry which has been folded and rolled into many, many thin, flaky layers (you can see the layers in the raw pastry, already visible partway through rolling, here on the left).

Preheat the oven to 230° C.

Use pastry cutters to make circles, or a knife to make squares, and place a dollop of the cold char siu mixture in the centre of each. Use a beaten egg to seal the edges, crimp with a fork and make a little hole with your fork in the top side of each pastry (important, this - it will allow steam to escape and prevent your pastries from gaping open when they cook). Brush each one with some of that beaten egg, and put on a non-stick baking sheet in the oven for 10 minutes. When the 10 minutes are up, reduce the heat to 200° C and bake for a further 20 minutes. Cool the pastries a little before you eat - the insides will be unbelievably hot, as well as unbelievably delicious.

Pulled pork

This is a wonderful American way with pork. Barbecue purists (a curiously wonderful breed made up entirely of American men - I have never met a woman or a non-American who takes the barbecue quite as seriously as these guys do) should haul out their smokers for this recipe. One team at the American Royal Barbecue championship last year had a smoker made from the body of a Cessna aeroplane.

I used my oven and added a tablespoon of liquid smoke at the end.

The smoke flavour in this recipe is a great addition (UK cooks can buy liquid smoke online - I haven't found a brand I've not enjoyed, but Colgin makes a particularly good version). All the same, if you don't have access to a small adapted aircraft or liquid smoke, you shouldn't worry. Your pork will still have a wonderful, barbecue sauce flavour.

In the US you'd use pork butt (actually shoulder) for this recipe. In other countries like the UK we butcher pigs rather differently, so just find a nice, fatty, boned piece of shoulder if you can't get your hands on the exact cut. The fat is important; the joint cooks for a long time and its fat will baste it from within and keep the meat delectably moist.

To serve about six people you'll need:

One boneless pork butt or boneless shoulder (about 3 lb)
4 tablespoons soft light brown sugar
2 tablespoons coarse salt
2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons cinnamon powder
1 tablespoon mustard powder
10 turns of the peppermill
1 tablespoon chilli powder (I used chipotle chilli powder for the smoky taste, but you can use your favourite)
1 teaspoon coriander powder
1 teaspoon onion salt
12 fl oz (1 ½ cups) apple juice
6 fl oz (¾ cup) water

Mix all the dry ingredients in a large bowl, and rub them thoroughly all over the pork in the same bowl. If your cut of meat has been boned and rolled, you can push some of the rub into the space where the bone used to be as well, seasoning the meat inside and out. Leave the meat in the bowl and leave, covered, in the fridge overnight.

About six hours before you want to eat, preheat the oven or smoker to 150° C (300° F). Place the pork joint, skin side up, on a rack in a roasting tin. Pour the apple juice and water into the bottom of the tin. (The liquid should not be touching the meat.) Cover the roasting tin tightly with a few layers of tin foil and place in the oven for five hours. Don't poke at the pork while it's cooking; it should be left to steam gently in its tinfoil hat.

When the five hours are up, remove the tinfoil. If the liquid in the pan looks like it might dry up, add a wine glass of water. Turn the heat up to 200° C (400° F) and cook the joint uncovered for half an hour. Remove the meat to a large bowl, keeping the juices in the bottom of the roasting tin.

Use two forks to shred the pork. It'll come to pieces very easily after the long cooking time, and should be moist and delicate with a slight crisp to the outsides. Place the shredded pork in a large frying pan with all its juices and the liquid from the roasting tin. Add another tablespoon of soft light brown sugar, an extra teaspoon of chilli powder if you want some extra kick, and a tablespoon of liquid smoke if you can find some (I like applewood liquid smoke for this recipe). Cook over a medium heat until the liquid in the pan begins to become syrupy.

Serve the pork with its sauce in toasted burger buns. The pork will keep in the fridge for a couple of days. Sweetcorn, coleslaw and other traditional barbecue accompaniments make a great side dish. Try not to get too much down your front.

There is a pig in my garden

I don't normally post non-food trivia, but this was much too good to not share - there is a pig in my garden. I have no idea where he came from, but messages have been left at all the farms in the village, so hopefully someone will pick him up soon.

He's a very splendid, fat, hairy pig. I'm starting to think we should pignap and keep him, although it should be noted that Dr Weasel has started talking in dark tones about bacon.

***Pig update***
George the Pig (for this is his name - he is a Kune Kune pig) is safely installed in his field again. George is friends with a goat who managed to break through their fencing, and being a gregarious sort of pig decided to follow his goat friend; unfortunately, the goat skipped off into the distance leaving George, who has short legs and is rather fat, to wander into my garden and rootle around a bit until somebody noticed.

I was expecting George's owner to come with some kind of pig harness, or perhaps a shepherd's crook, but it transpired that all that was needed to get George to follow him home was a banana waved just out of reach of his snout. I hope he was allowed to eat it when they got back.

Char siu bao - Chinese steamed pork buns

Char siu (see my recipe from last week) on its own is wonderful stuff. Chopped, cooked into a sticky, savoury, meaty mixture and sealed inside a light steamed bun, it becomes something really, really special. It's a dim sum staple; a filling, moreish little bun of scrumptiousness.

When we're in Malaysia, my very favourite breakfast is one of these buns. It makes a splendidly fattening change from muesli. Once you have a strip of char siu in the house, the buns are very simple to assemble. They're also a doddle to reheat - just steam for ten minutes - and they freeze like a dream.

If you made the braised pork with accompanying buns, you'll recognise the dough recipe here. The method is slightly different, in that you'll be stuffing your buns before steaming. To make about twenty buns you'll need:

Filling
1 fillet of char siu (about 10 oz)
2 tablespoons lard
4 fat cloves garlic, chopped finely
1 medium onion, cut into small dice
5 teaspoons caster sugar
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1 teaspoon dark soya sauce
2 teaspoons light soya sauce
4 fl oz water
1 tablespoon plain flour
2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Buns
1 pack instant yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons lukewarm water
½ tablespoon salt
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
8 tablespoons sugar
8 fl oz lukewarm water
20 oz white flour

Filling method
Cut the char siu strip into tiny cubes with a knife and fork, and blend the vegetable oil and flour in a cup. Fry the garlic in the lard until it starts to turn colour, add the onions and cook until they are translucent. Pour in the sugar, sesame oil, soya sauces and water and bring up to a simmer. Add the chopped meat, stir until well-coated, then add the oil and flour. Continue to simmer for 30 seconds, then transfer to a bowl and chill.

Buns method
Mix the yeast, 1 teaspoon of sugar, two tablespoons of lukewarm water, half a tablespoon of salt and three tablespoons of vegetable oil in a teacup, and let it stand for five minutes.

Place the flour in a bowl and pour the yeast mixture into a depression in the centre of the flour. Add 8 tablespoons of castor sugar and 8 fl oz lukewarm water to the mixture and stir the flour with your hand until everything is brought together.

At this point the dough will be very sticky. Don't worry - just knead for ten minutes or so, and it will turn smooth and glossy. Don't add extra flour to get rid of the stickiness. The action of kneading will make the protein strands in the dough develop, and the stickiness will vanish on its own. You'll know that your dough is ready when it has become smooth, and does not stick to the bowl. Cover the bowl with cling film and leave in a warm place until the dough has doubled in size.

Knock the dough down again, and take an egg-sized piece in the palm of your left hand. Stretch it and squash it on your palm until you have a disc about the size of your hand. Still holding the disc of dough, put a teaspoon and a half of the chilled filling in the centre of the disc, then gather the edges to the centre and pinch closed. Put the pinched side of the bun on a square of greaseproof paper. Leave the filled buns in a warm place until doubled in size.

Steam the buns over boiling water for ten minutes to cook. Once cooked, the buns can be eaten hot (or cold in a packed lunch) - just steam again to reheat. The cooked buns will freeze well; they'll also keep in the fridge for a few days.

Char siu - Chinese barbecued pork

Char siu is a brilliantly versatile thing. Even if you're not familiar with it by name, you've almost certainly tasted it before; it's the reddish pork that appears in little pieces in every Special Fried Rice in every Chinese restaurant and takeaway in the country, in those wonderful fluffy buns you get as dim sum (my recipe for those buns is here), on its own over rice as a roast meat, and sliced thickly in a million different noodle dishes. It's a sweetly glazed, aromatically spiced, perfectly delicious piece of meat, and one of my very favourite things to do with pork.

This recipe makes a single fillet of char siu. I'd recommend you at least double it - you're going to need a whole fillet of the stuff for Monday's recipe, and you'll probably want to eat at least some as soon as it comes out of the oven. Char siu freezes well too, so you don't need to worry about cooking too much.

A note on the glaze and colour. The strips of char siu you'll see in Chinese shops are usually glazed with maltose, a sugary by-product of the brewing industry. It does achieve a really gorgeous, crackly sheen, but it's not got a lot of flavour or sweetness, and I find it's not as tasty as glazing with a honey/soy mixture, thinned with a little vegetable oil to help the sugar catch and caramelise. Shop-bought char siu is normally very red, because a little food colouring is used in the marinade. Feel free to add half a teaspoon to yours if you like - I find I'm happy with the less shocking colour the meat gets from the hoi sin sauce in its marinade.

To make one strip of char siu (enough for three as a roast meat on rice) you'll need:

1 pork fillet

Marinade
5 tablespoons light soya sauce
3 tablespoons dark soya sauce
5 tablespoons runny honey
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon five spice powder
½ glass Chinese rice wine (sherry will do if you can't find any)
3 tablespoons Hoisin sauce (I like Lee Kum Kee)
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, crushed
4 fat cloves of garlic, crushed

Glaze
2 tablespoons runny honey
1 tablespoon dark soya sauce
1 tablespoon vegetable oil

Mix all the marinade ingredients together and warm through in a saucepan until the sugar has all dissolved. Pour the warm marinade over the pork, and leave for at least eight hours in the fridge.

To cook the char siu, heat the oven to 210° C and place the meat, basted with some of its marinade, on a rack over a roasting tin with a couple of centimetres of water in it. Roast for 20 minutes, then baste again on both sides, turn the meat over and reduce the heat to 180° C. Roast for another ten minutes, then baste and turn again, and roast for a final ten minutes.

Transfer the meat to a plate, empty the tin of water and line it with foil. Place the meat and rack back on the tin, then brush it liberally with the glaze and put it under the grill for about five minutes, until the glaze is glossy and starting to catch at the edges. Turn the meat, glaze again and put back under the grill until the other side is also glossy and starting to caramelise.

Malaysian braised pork with steamed buns

My Dad, like dads the world over, has a particular love for fatty foods from his childhood. (Here he is on the left of the picture, with my Mum and Dr Weasel.) He's not allowed them very often, largely because Mummy has very sensible intimations of mortality when looking at chunks of lard. Of course, the fact that he grew up in rural China and Malaysia makes that bit harder to find the things he remembers fondly in the UK. These foods are things like sweetened olives; Kong Piang (a special kind of Foochow biscuit you can only find in two towns in Malaysia); good Bak Kwa (flattened, sweetened, spicy barbecued pork); real satay, cooked ourdoors over fanned charcoal with the bites of meat separated by tiny nuggets of pork fat; and a million things made out of the obnoxious parts of a pig.

Mummy, the family cholesterol-conscience, went to Bordeaux last week to visit my increasingly famous brother and to add to her own high-powered wine-tasting qualifications. I was concerned that Daddy, left on his own unsupervised, would just eat congee (rice porridge) all week straight from the rice cooker, so I cooked one of those childhood-in-paradise dishes and we drove it over as a surprise. This recipe is adapted from Mrs Leong Yee Soo's The Best of Malaysian Cooking, my favourite Malaysian cookery book. The dish is a family must-eat whenever we visit Malaysia.

If you cook this, you don't strictly need the steamed buns to accompany the meat; having said that, you'll really be missing out if you don't make them. This is the same dough you'll find in char siu buns. It's the perfect foil to the salty, aromatic pork, and the dough itself is just gorgeous to work with. It's sugary, so the yeast works hard, and you'll find it beautifully soft and puffy, like a baby's cheek. The traditional technique will have you fold the oiled bun in half before steaming, so it opens when finished like a pristine sandwich bun for you to pack with meat and juices. To serve four with some left over for lunch, you'll need:

Braised pork
2lb fat pork with some skin (I used a piece of shoulder - you can use whatever cut you like.)
3 tablespoons dark soy
4 teaspoons runny honey
1 teaspoon five-spice powder
5 cloves garlic
4 shallots
2 ½ stars of star anise
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons salt
8fl oz water
2 tablespoons lard

Buns
1 pack instant yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons lukewarm water
½ tablespoon salt
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
8 tablespoons sugar
8 fl oz lukewarm water
20 oz white flour

Pork method
Start by rubbing the pork with a tablespoon of soya sauce, a teaspoon of the honey and the five spice powder, and set it aside to marinade for at least half an hour while you prepare the other pork ingredients. Place the garlic, shallots, half a piece of star anise and a tablespoon of sugar in the food processor, and whizz until they're very finely blended. Heat the lard in a wok and fry the blended ingredients until they've turned golden.

Turn the heat down and add the pork to the pan along with any juices. Brown it all over, then add two tablespoons of dark soya sauce, two teaspoons of salt and three teaspoons of honey. Pour over half the water, and cook, covered for ten minutes. After ten minutes remove the lid and simmer gently until the sauce is thick and reduced.

Add the rest of the water, and bring to a brisk boil, stirring constantly to prevent sticking. Turn the heat down to a gentle simmer and cover again. Simmer, covered, for 2 hours until the meat is tender, turning the meat in the sauce occasionally. Add a little water if you feel the sauce is becoming dry.

Buns method
Mix the yeast, 1 teaspoon of sugar, two tablespoons of lukewarm water, half a tablespoon of salt and three tablespoons of vegetable oil in a teacup, and let it stand for five minutes.

Place the flour in a bowl and pour the yeast mixture into a depression in the centre of the flour. Add 8 tablespoons of castor sugar and 8 fl oz lukewarm water to the mixture and stir the flour with your hand until everything is brought together.

At this point the dough will be very sticky. Don't worry - just knead for ten minutes or so, and it will turn smooth and glossy. Don't add extra flour to get rid of the stickiness. The action of kneading will make the protein strands in the dough develop, and the stickiness will vanish on its own. You'll know that your dough is ready when it has become smooth, and does not stick to the bowl. Cover the bowl with cling film and leave in a warm place until the dough has doubled in size.

Knock the dough back down and separate it into pieces the size of an egg. Roll each piece into a ball in your hands and flatten it with a rolling pin, then brush the top with oil and fold the bun in half. Place it on a square of greaseproof paper.

Arrange the folded buns on baking sheets, and cover with a dry teatowel. Leave in a warm place for 20 minutes, until they have risen again. Steam the buns for 7-10 minutes to cook. (You can steam the buns again to reheat.)

Pork stuffed with an apricot and tarragon butter

Pork fillet is a lovely cut of meat, but it lacks the fat found in other bits of the pig needed to make it really glossy and toothsome when cooked. The easiest and most delicious way to remedy this is to cut channels into the meat and stuff them with a flavoured butter, wrapping the whole fillet in Parma ham to keep things together.

I chose an apricot and tarragon butter here; the two flavours are great together and complement the pork beautifully. I used the Magimix to make the butter, but if you don't have a food processor, just chop all the solid ingredients finely and blend with the butter in a mortar and pestle. To serve four, you'll need:

1 pork fillet (tenderloin)
4 oz salted butter
8 semi-dried apricots
1 fresh chilli, deseeded
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 large handful fresh tarragon
1 large handful fresh parsley
4 shallots
Juice of half a lemon
2 teaspoons soya sauce
8 slices Parma ham

Put the butter, lemon juice, soya sauce, apricots, herbs, spices and shallots into the bowl of a food processor and whizz until finely blended. Cut channels into the meat by pushing a knife straight into it at 5 cm intervals, and stuff the butter into them, smearing any extra over the surface of the joint. Wrap the joint tightly in Parma ham and secure with string.

Roast the fillet at 200° C for 40 minutes, and rest for five minutes before serving with potatoes and a green vegetable, the pan juices poured over the meat.

Thai pork toasts

Kanom Punk Na Moo, or pork toasts, are right up there with my favourite unhealthy Thai starters. If you're not familiar with them, imagine a Chinese sesame prawn toast without the sesame and the prawns, but with a moist and fragrant layer of pork instead. The little toasts are deep-fried, which makes the bread crisp and seals the rich, savoury coating's flavour in. Some recipes use prawn in the mixture with the pork, but this is as authentic, less expensive and really, really delicious. This is unusual in being a Thai recipe whose ingredients are pretty easy to get hold of in the UK.

It's important that you use boring old supermarket white, sliced bread in this recipe. Your home-made, stone-ground wheat loaf may be delicious toasted for breakfast, but it just won't work in this recipe; you need plain old white bread here. (There are a few things for which nothing but sliced white will do, including the fried bread which accompanies your cooked breakfast.)

To serve six you'll need:

750g minced pork
6 tablespoons mushroom soya sauce (available at oriental grocers' shops)
1 heaped tablespoon cornflour
2 handfuls minced coriander
4 chopped spring onions
6 large cloves garlic, crushed
1 egg
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
8 slices white bread
Oil for deep frying

Remove the crusts from the bread and cut each slice into quarters.

Mix the pork, soya sauce, cornflour, coriander, spring onions, garlic, egg and pepper in a large bowl, using your hands, until everything is well blended. Use a spatula to press a tablespoon or so of mixture into each little piece of bread, cutting more bread if you need it.

Heat fresh oil to 190°C, and fry the little toasts in batches for six minutes each. That's it; you're done. Serve with Thai sweet chilli sauce and Ar Jard sauce.

Roast belly pork with fennel seeds

See this post for methods to get your pork crackling crisp and puffy.

I bought this belly pork from Sainsbury's to see how successfully it would roast; I'm looking for belly pork to make Siu Yuk, a Chinese crispy belly pork with, and am roasting it in a European style until I find a successful joint which is fatty enough. This joint wasn't fatty enough, but it made a rich and delicious supper roasted Italian-style with lemon, fennel and onions.

Update - about a year later, I did manage to track down some pork which was just right for Chinese crispy belly pork. You can see that recipe here.

The joint was really quite disturbingly lean and upsettingly tiny (this is what I get for supermarket shopping late at night in the middle of the week), but at least it was nice and dry. It's not always easy to find belly pork on the bone in the first place; when roasted this only yielded about two tablespoons of fat. Amazing; this is where a pig stores its body fat, and I would expect to see nice, thick lines of white fat separating the layers of lean meat, with a soft layer beneath the skin to aid crackling. This pig had been working out (or had been bred for lean meat, but there's a whole post on exactly what I think of modern farming methods waiting to be written one day when I'm in a bad mood). I had some lard in the fridge from a pork joint I cooked a while ago, and used that to annoint my anorexic pig-tum.

I've noticed fennel being used with pork in a lot of restaurants recently, and it's a very good accompaniment. With lemon and onion it makes for a rich base of flavour. To serve two, you'll need:

800g belly pork on the bone
1 onion, sliced thinly
1 lemon, sliced thinly
4 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon fennel seeds
1 tablespoon lard
Salt and pepper

Prepare the pork skin for crackling, being very sure on this small joint to keep your scoring close. Rub the surface with salt, pepper and half of the fennel, and place the whole joint in a roasting tin on top of the sliced onion and lemon (skin still on), sprinkled with the rest of the fennel, and the whole cloves of garlic. Roast at 220°C for half an hour, then bring the temperature down to 150°C for twenty minutes. Rub the skin with the lard, and finish the joint under a hot grill for around five minutes, watching it carefully to stop the crackling from catching.

I served this with mashed potato and sweet red and yellow, pointed peppers which I grilled in a griddle-pan on the top of the oven, mixing the juice from the peppers with the pork's pan juices to make a kind of gravy. Rich and delicious.